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4.0 New Strategies for a Paradigm Shift (1850 - 1900) - Economising Justice and the Machinery of Legitimation
In a free society, attempts at spurring
innovation of the political infrastructure are an important part of the
discovery process supported by politics and the state. A formative
outcome of political innovation specific to an open-access society is
the shift in the relative weight of decisions or policies designated as
“just” compared to those categorised as “legitimate.” In traditional,
culturally uniform societies with little value diversity, the minutest
details of life may be regulated in terms of being “just” or “unjust.”
In a complex and populous society that grants considerable personal
autonomy, there is a need to economise on absolute judgements. Justice
as an absolute value becomes reserved to authenticate fundamental
requirements of coexistence, the constitutive rules of the game. Many
other contentious issues are processed by the political infrastructure
to classify them as “legitimate” or “not legitimate.” Once a policy
proposal has passed the various tests of legitimacy it may still not be
regarded as “just” by sizeable numbers of players, but it will be
tolerated as “legitimate,” i.e. legitimately arrived at. For instance,
legislation concerning abortion may be countenanced as “legitimate” by
the same people who view it as “unjust.” The political construct of
legitimacy provides a peaceable diversion around a deadly battlefield
where absolute concepts of justice collide unforgivingly. Again, we
encounter a case of repeated games helping to transcend rational
impasses by showing promise to improve the odds for mutually
advantageous long-term conditions of coexistence. It is for this reason
that the machinery of legitimation figures as a prime target for
political innovation in a free society.
When by the mid-1800s restrictionist
interest groups found themselves cut off from effective political
support by the dominant parties, and emerging third parties congenial to
their cause foundered, they poured energy into developing innovative
ways to influence the machinery of legitimation. By (1) aligning
themselves with trendy intellectual developments favourable to their
cause and (2) pioneering extra-party and non-electoral forms of
political influence they came close to bringing about a shift of
paradigm in the public outlook on immigration.
As for intellectual developments, one
needs to bear in mind that for many people it used to be second nature
to think of certain other humans in racial, quasi-racial or otherwise
discriminatory terms. The inviting attitude in regard to immigration was
largely a form of favourable racial discrimination confined to males
hailing from the Northwest of Europe. At the time, the Darwinian
revolution was acquiring new guises in the social sciences, some
influential variants of which would lend the dignity of science to
blatantly racist taxonomies. Eugenics, founded by Darwin’s cousin
Francis Galton, was beginning to gain popular credibility and scientific
respect.
“In an outpouring of scholarly articles
published during the 1890s, several of the countries most respected
intellectuals fundamentally recast the American immigration debate.”
(p.77) The new paradigm spawned a multi-variant arsenal of reasons for
excluding aliens, such as differentiating between old immigrants,
needful at the time and of hardy stock, and new immigrants, depraved,
effeminate and unneeded in the face of an allegedly lessened demand of
unskilled labour.
The movement was spearheaded by the
Immigration Restriction league (IRL), an organisation founded by Harvard
alumni fearing for their political and economic clout, and drawing
support “from the ranks of upper-class academics, businessmen,
politicians, and various professionals who saw themselves as the last
line of defence for Anglo-Saxon traditions.” (p.76)
Taking skilfully advantage of (1) the
newly acquired scientific semblance of discriminatory theories, and (2)
frustration with corruption in politics, the IRL also pioneered new ways
to benefit from (3) the growth of the federal state and the increased
bureaucratic complexity of government.
Aware of the expansion of congressional
administrative tasks and tools, protagonists of the IRL realised that
the new standing congressional committees resembled what Woodrow Wilson
was to designate as “little legislatures” and “the most essential
machinery of our government system.” (p.76)
They set out to advocate Progressive notions of “scientific government” and “direct democracy,” capturing the bureaucracies’ natural need for and susceptibility to direct input by those successfully presenting themselves as experts. Given the intellectual climate and their direct connection with policy makers, restrictionists had the edge over expansionists, especially over the new targets of anti-immigration initiatives: politically unorganised newcomers from eastern and southern Europe. IRL activists became integral part of a national immigration policy network, supplying the pertinent House and Senate committees with a welcome stream of statistical material, research papers, and expert witnesses. In this way, the IRL was able to seize the initiative in shaping policies and providing rationalisations that reform-minded lawmakers were happy to ponder or even adopt.
The lynch-pin of the envisioned shift in
the national policy paradigm was a bill requiring a mandatory literacy
test for all immigrants.
In 1898, the bill won passage in the
Senate, its success owing “much to the endorsement of the immigration
committee, prominent support from social scientists, and the relative
absence of interest group opposition.” (p.82) But when House and Senate
conferees met to discuss the bill, increasingly organised interests,
pro-immigrant business and ethnic groups, began to build a formidable
front of resistance. The bill’s fate showcases how under political
freedom different interests compete over the right to change the social
contract. In the face of mounting opposition, the IRL ultimately failed
to rally significant additional support for the bill, notably from
organised labour, while key ethnic constituencies of the Democratic
party exerted pressure on president Grover Cleveland to veto the
literacy test bill. The president complied. However, the bill’s sponsors
were confident that a large Republican majority in Congress would
override the presidential veto. But the oppositional forces from
business groups, German organisations, Jewish, Italian and Catholic
leaders, the Chamber of Commerce and other organisations were
relentless, demonstrating a cautious Congress the determination and
prowess of a whole phalanx of pro-immigration interests. At the end of
the day, Congress elected not to overturn the presidential decision.
Also, the near success of the bill alerted oppositional forces to the
political innovation that the anti-immigrant movement had been able to
exploit to its advantage.
Political competition always affects and
is affected by intellectual currents vying for epistemic hegemony in
the public discourse. Both in a dependent position as well as a driving
force, the political discovery process is enmeshed in the evolution of
intellectual and scientific trends. A vast subject in its own right, we
can only touch on the fact that politics is exposed to episodes of
intellectual history whose soundness may be revealed, if ever, only by
some considerable delay. Add to it that the subjects of political
discourse may not be amenable to objective assessment, and that politics
is faced with rational ignorance and substantive ignorance on a massive
scale. Cognitive separation, i.e. completely different and
irreconcilable perceptions, among the contestants in the political race
is substantial, normal, and inevitable. It must be admitted and
peaceably managed in a free society.
5.0 Conclusion
Discovery through political competition
is not without risks, and it cannot guarantee the absence of severe
error, but it is still the best way (1) to incorporate knowledge
generated in civil society, (2) to keep politically dominant views
exposed to ongoing corroboration and (3) to include the largest possible
number of interest groups in the permanent sequel of repeated games
that produce effective trust in society, thus bringing about the dynamic
equilibrium of dissension and pacification which defines feasible
freedom.
5.1 Lessons for Freedom
Classical liberalism tends to
misunderstand or ignore the political logic of freedom, owing to a
monadic conception of the rights underlying personal freedom. In theory,
these rights are absolute, immutable, and monadic, i.e. attached to and
owned by the individual in inalienable form. Under feasible freedom,
however, people, in exercising their liberty, negotiate and renegotiate
these rights, both in politics and in private transactions. Free
citizens constantly renegotiate new permutations of feasible freedom,
thereby constantly rewriting the social contract.
We detect an unexpected and rather
incongruous similarity of deficiency in socialist ambitions for central
planning and liberal calls for a depoliticised society. Both desiderata
are based on incomprehension of a vital spontaneous order which concerns
the economy in the case of socialism and politics and the state in the
case of liberalism. Both political camps underrate or misconstrue the
need and the logic of the indispensable discovery procedures required
for strong economic performance and, respectively, the feasibility of
civil society at large.
As there is no single person or group of
persons capable of registering all inputs needed to calculate an
efficient allocative distribution, Hayek suggests inclusion of all
citizens in a free economy to approximate far better the needed range
and quality of information. Analogously, no single person or group of
persons is capable of registering the inputs needed to take better
political decisions than are available from a regime that guarantees the
possibility for all citizens to make their contribution to political
decision making. Incongruously, liberalisms akin to Hayek’s insinuate
the equivalent of an impersonal central planer by suggesting that
observance of certain rules activate automatisms in a free society,
notably the market mechanism and the rule of law, that reduce the need
of politics to such an extent as to portray freedom as a state of
affairs distinguished by the absence of significant levels of
politicisation - a visionary predilection that amounts to the
disenfranchisement of the public.
A free society, this is the claim of the
present paper, is akin to a free economy, in so far as only the
mobilisation of dispersed knowledge lodged in decentralised units
(citizens and their organisations) can bring about a discovery process
capable of sustaining human relations that make freedom is feasible.
Liberalism cannot fulfil its role in a
free society unless it acknowledges that its leadership in matters of
constitutional integrity does not carry over into the area of legitimate
political discretion. And liberalism must recognise that within the
boundaries of constitutional integrity there is substantial leeway for
political discretion by players of quite distinct emphases of vision.
Freedom remains an open-ended project.
In order to establish her meaning and
detailed shape, liberty depends on a political infrastructure that
engages contestants in a competitive discovery process that is likely to
result in eclectic policy outcomes deviating from puristic ideological
positions. Adaptability is a survival requirement for any agent
participating in the political discovery process. Puristic ideologies
fail to stay in touch with the diversity of interests and views that
push toward concrete policies. Feasible freedom may be conceived of as a
dynamic equilibrium balancing dissension and peaceableness.
Approximating the balance requires that the competing agents
continuously search for new information about the prospects of their
agendas, swiftly adjusting the latter to sustain support and the power
to exercise influence. Precise and consistent accounts of freedom such
as endeavoured by classical liberalism play an important role in
clarifying the rules of the discovery game and the inalienable contours
of freedom, but they are too abstract and too general to be able to
prejudge the differing aims that people ought to be free to pursue
within the competitive political framework of an open access society.
Ideologies lend impetus to freedom’s sine qua non: discovery by
political competition, but they do so fruitfully only when being capable
of changing and renewing themselves in response to the findings
elicited by the search.
The success of politics under feasible
freedom is to be judged by the ability to balance dissension and
peaceableness under the auxiliary conditions of high levels of personal
autonomy, productivity, and wealth. We may register good performance and
even progress along these lines in the very presence of states of
affairs that appear insufferable from a classical liberal point of view.
But it should not be forgotten that classical liberalism is just a set
of hypotheses, some of which are rejected by freedom. Freedom is not
identical with liberalism. Freedom is not identical with liberalism‘s
account or expectations of her.
End.
Summary of Milestones of US Immigration Policies
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